Another year is just about in the books, so it's time for the annual reflections and predictions articles across industries - the focus here at InTek is, of course, on freight and logistics. What will the market bring? What factors play the biggest role? Is there reasonable hope for a freight recovery? Read on for our 2026 freight forecast, plus a review of our expectations vs. reality for the past year.
As a high-level summary of the 2026 freight market outlook, the market is increasingly set up for something that feels a lot like 2019. In other words, if you’re looking for a clean, demand-led “turn” in the coming year, the current cycle is sending a different message: choppy, policy-distorted, and prone to “head-fake” rate moves that don’t translate into durable volume growth.
That doesn’t mean 2026 will be a collapse, although it will be for those freight companies that have been on knife’s edge of financial challenges brought on by a depressed freight market that is also plagued with higher operating costs.
So, our overall thoughts for 2026 boil down to what will likely be a muddle-through year again where the freight market stays active, even busy at times, but not consistently healthy. And with that being the case, we’ve started to see a number of sizable bankruptcies start to hit the tape in the last quarter of 2025 and expect others to come, along with some stressed merger - acquisitions in 2026.
Before we dive in further to the coming year, let's take a glance at the rearview mirror to see how our predictions for the past year turned out for some added context.
At the start of 2025, InTek’s base-case freight outlook was cautiously constructive. Coming out of a prolonged downturn that began in earnest in July 2022, we expected the combination of Federal Reserve rate cuts, easing financial conditions, and a gradual recovery in industrial activity to set the stage for a freight rebound in the second half of 2025.
That view was laid out in our 2025 U.S. Freight Market Outlook, published at the end of 2024. At the time, the framework was straightforward and consistent with prior cycles:
In short, we expected late-2025 to mark the transition from bottoming to recovery.
While we expected a 2nd half freight recovery, we had five cautionary notes that could cause our projections to “go off the rails” of which the following four hit the freight market hard:
By March and April of 2025, it became clear that something was off. Freight activity remained uneven, volume growth failed to follow early optimism, and what strength did appear increasingly traced back to policy timing and inventory behavior, not organic demand.
This is where InTek’s commentary, particularly through our blogs, monthly intermodal reports, and my (InTek CEO Rick LaGore’s), LinkedIn posts began to shift.
Instead of framing the market as “late-cycle but improving,” we started highlighting three developments that were becoming impossible to ignore:
By late spring, our internal language, and increasingly our external commentary, reflected a more cautious stance. The freight recovery we expected to begin taking shape in 2H 2025 was not materializing in the data and had truly “gone off the rails”.
So, 2025 was not a complete collapse, but more of the same seen since July 2022, with signs that 2026 would look like 2019 because of the distortions we saw in 2018-2019 would rhyme with our expectations to 2025-2026.
With the look back complete, below is a more detailed review of what to expect in 2026 - and why 2019 echoes loudly.
The reason 2019 is such a useful comparison to where we are now is that it wasn’t a classic consumer/credit recession, therefore the freight market didn’t implode; it stagnated in an economy that stayed on its feet.
In 2019, the freight cycle got distorted by trade policies of 2018 and inventory timing:
You can see the same “rates vs. volumes” disconnect showing up again. For example, Cass’ November 2025 report showed shipments down 7.6% y/y while expenditures were only down 1.2% y/y, and the Cass Truckload Linehaul Index was up 2.2% y/y, which illustrates a pattern of weak volume but firmer implied pricing.
That “pricing can firm without a true demand rebound” is exactly the kind of environment that produced repeated false expectations of a recovery in 2019.
When freight is being driven by policy deadlines, it behaves differently:
Recent port and trade reporting strongly supports your pull-forward/payback narrative. Reuters reported that Port of Los Angeles imports fell 11.5% y/y in November 2025 after earlier inventory stocking to get ahead of tariffs and noted ongoing uncertainty around tariff policy.
The Port of Los Angeles itself has also described tariff-driven volatility and weakening volumes tied to trade policy uncertainty.
What this tends to produce in 2026:
And importantly, when tariffs raise prices, they can reduce demand. In Reuters coverage, Michigan State’s Jason Miller put it plainly: higher prices mean less demand, and less demand means less freight.
One of the most important lessons from 2019: the Fed can ease, and freight can still stagnate.
The Fed cut rates three times in 2019 … July, September, and October …yet freight didn’t snap into a durable recovery, because the constraints were trade uncertainty, industrial softness, and inventory behavior, not simply the cost of capital.
That’s why the right mental model for 2026 is:
ACT’s market commentary echoes the “defensive into 2026” stance, tying the outlook to tariff authority uncertainty and capacity contraction vs. demand rebound.
Inventory cycles quietly control freight cycles.
After pull-forward waves, businesses tend to:
That produces:
Until we see a shift, you should expect what you described perfectly: busy but not healthy.
With the macro view behind us, let's take a look at what we exepct to see in the individual freight modes in 2026.
Truckload in 2026 is set up to improve primarily because capacity continues to rationalize, not because demand suddenly booms.
That creates a very specific outcome:
Spot will remain headline-grabbing because it’s sensitive to short-term disruptions:
A good example is the recent DAT report showing winter weather and holiday positioning can lift spot pricing meaningfully in short windows.
That’s real, but it’s not the same as a sustained demand-led recovery.
For 2026, the most probable base case is:
Translation: we can expect tightness in the market, but without getting healthy demand across the freight market.
Rail and intermodal often flash the signal earlier because they are tightly tied to:
AAR (Association of American Railroads) weekly data began showing intermodal running below prior-year levels in multiple weeks starting in the 4th quarter of 2025. The decreases will lead to the overall performance to be essentially flat versus prior year.
The decreases have not been significant, but they align with a market that’s cooling after pull-forward and cautious inventory posture.
Even if service improves (fluidity, dwell, fewer disruptions), intermodal can remain muted if:
That’s why 2026 may look like:
LTL can maintain pricing power longer than TL during soft patches because:
But the limiter remains tonnage / shipment weight / industrial activity. In an environment where:
In other words, LTL continues to grind it out in 2026.
Ocean is highly exposed to tariff pull-forward dynamics:
Recent reporting by Reuters emphasized that tariff shifts and front-loading created a roller coaster dynamic for major gateways, with expectations that trade cools into 2026.
Base case for 2026 ocean:
If the Rea Sea corridor opens up, as ocean carriers start to push their equipment through the new global supply chain, the overcapacity will flood the market and put even more downward pressure on pricing.
One consideration that may play out comes from the global supply chain moving away from the USA, where limited capacity is needed for North America causing cancelled sailings, increase pricing and cause ocean capacity to become less reliable.
Another circumstance coming from this would be less opportunity for the intermodal re-positioning programs, as fewer containers will be pushed inland.
In policy-led cycles, rates can rise because supply shrinks, even while demand is soft. Cass’ recent pattern (weak shipments, firmer linehaul) is the textbook tell of this situation.
2019 is the proof case: the Fed cut three times, but freight didn’t sustainably heal.
If you want to know whether 2026 is setting up to be a 2019-style stall, watch for confirmation across the following that is tracked by monthly stats I compile within my Monthly Intermodal Report.
Cass Freight Index – Shipments
Cass Freight Index – Expenditures
Your framing holds up under public data: 2026 is shaping up like 2019 with a market where:
Until the cycle becomes demand-led and volume-led, expect a year of:
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